Twice-told tales
cannot quite dispel its obscurity. Your eye searches for whatever may
remind you of the living world. With eager minuteness you take note of
the table near the fireplace, the book with an ivory knife between its
leaves, the unfolded letter, the hat and the fallen glove. Soon the
flame vanishes, and with it the whole scene is gone, though its image
remains an instant in your mind’s eye when darkness has swallowed the
reality. Throughout the chamber there is the same obscurity as before,
but not the same gloom within your breast.
As your head falls back upon the pillow you think—in a whisper be it
spoken—how pleasant in these night solitudes would be the rise and fall
of a softer breathing than your own, the slight pressure of a tenderer
bosom, the quiet throb of a purer heart, imparting its peacefulness to
your troubled one, as if the fond sleeper were involving you in her
dream. Her influence is over you, though she have no existence but in
that momentary image. You sink down in a flowery spot on the borders of
sleep and wakefulness, while your thoughts rise before you in pictures,
all disconnected, yet all assimilated by a pervading gladsomeness and
beauty. The wheeling of gorgeous squadrons that glitter in the sun is
succeeded by the merriment of children round the door of a schoolhouse
beneath the glimmering shadow of old trees at the corner of a rustic
lane. You stand in the sunny rain of a summer shower, and wander among
the sunny trees of an autumnal wood, and look upward at the brightest
of all rainbows overarching the unbroken sheet of snow on the American
side of Niagara. Your mind struggles pleasantly between the dancing
radiance round the hearth of a young man and his recent bride and the
twittering flight of birds in spring about their new-made nest. You
feel the merry bounding of a ship before the breeze, and watch the
tuneful feet of rosy girls as they twine their last and merriest dance
in a splendid ball-room, and find yourself in the brilliant circle of a
crowded theatre as the curtain falls over a light and airy scene.
With an involuntary start you seize hold on consciousness, and prove
yourself but half awake by running a doubtful parallel between human
life and the hour which has now elapsed. In both you emerge from
mystery, pass through a vicissitude that you can but imperfectly
control, and are borne onward to another mystery. Now comes the peal of
the distant clock with fainter and fainter strokes as you plunge
farther into the wilderness of sleep. It is the knell of a temporary
death. Your spirit has departed, and strays like a free citizen among
the people of a shadowy world, beholding strange sights, yet without
wonder or dismay. So calm, perhaps, will be the final change—so
undisturbed, as if among familiar things, the entrance of the soul to
its eternal home.
THE VILLAGE UNCLE
AN IMAGINARY RETROSPECT
Come! another log upon the hearth. True, our little parlor is
comfortable, especially here where the old man sits in his old
arm-chair; but on Thanksgiving-night the blaze should dance higher up
the chimney and send a shower of sparks into the outer darkness. Toss
on an armful of those dry oak chips, the last relicts of the Mermaid’s
knee-timbers—the bones of your namesake, Susan. Higher yet, and
clearer, be the blaze, till our cottage windows glow the ruddiest in
the village and the light of our household mirth flash far across the
bay to Nahant.
And now come, Susan; come, my children. Draw your chairs round me, all
of you. There is a dimness over your figures. You sit quivering
indistinctly with each motion of the blaze, which eddies about you like
a flood; so that you all have the look of visions or people that dwell
only in the firelight, and will vanish from existence as completely as
your own shadows when the flame shall sink among the embers.
Hark! let me listen for the swell of the surf; it should be audible a
mile inland on a night like this. Yes; there I catch the sound, but
only an uncertain murmur, as if a good way down over the beach, though
by the almanac it is high tide at eight o’clock, and the billows must
now be dashing within thirty yards of our door. Ah! the old man’s ears
are failing him, and so is his eyesight, and perhaps his mind, else you
would not all be so shadowy in the blaze of his Thanksgiving fire.
How strangely the past is peeping over the shoulders of the present! To
judge by my recollections, it is but a few moments since I sat in
another room. Yonder model of a vessel was not there, nor the old chest
of drawers, nor Susan’s profile and mine in that gilt frame—nothing, in
short, except this same fire, which glimmered on books, papers and a
picture, and half discovered my solitary figure in a looking-glass. But
it was paler than my rugged old self, and younger, too, by almost half
a century.
Speak to me, Susan; speak, my beloved ones; for the scene is glimmering
on my sight again, and as it brightens you fade away. Oh, I should be
loth to lose my treasure of past happiness and become once more what I
was then—a hermit in the depths of my own mind, sometimes yawning over
drowsy volumes and anon a scribbler of wearier trash than what I read;
a man who had wandered out of the real world and got into its shadow,
where his troubles, joys and vicissitudes were of such slight stuff
that he hardly knew whether he lived or only dreamed of living. Thank
Heaven I am an old man now and have done with all such vanities!
Still this dimness of mine eyes!—Come nearer, Susan, and stand before
the fullest blaze of the hearth. Now I behold you illuminated from head
to foot, in your clean cap and decent gown, with the dear lock of gray
hair across your forehead and a quiet smile about your mouth, while the
eyes alone are concealed by the red gleam of the fire upon your
spectacles. There! you made me tremble again. When the flame quivered,
my sweet Susan, you quivered with it and grew indistinct, as if melting
into the warm light, that my last glimpse of you might be as visionary
as the first was, full many a year since. Do you remember it? You stood
on the little bridge over the brook that runs across King’s Beach into
the sea. It was twilight, the waves rolling in, the wind sweeping by,
the crimson clouds fading in the west and the silver moon brightening
above the hill; and on the bridge were you, fluttering in the breeze
like a sea-bird that might skim away at your pleasure. You seemed a
daughter of the viewless wind, a creature of the ocean-foam and the
crimson light, whose merry life was spent in dancing on the crests of
the billows that threw up their spray to support your footsteps. As I
drew nearer I fancied you akin to the race of mermaids, and thought how
pleasant it would be to dwell with you among the quiet coves in the
shadow of the cliffs, and to roam along secluded beaches of the purest
sand, and, when our Northern shores grew bleak, to haunt the islands,
green and lonely, far amid summer seas. And yet it gladdened me, after
all this nonsense, to find you nothing but a pretty young girl sadly
perplexed with the rude behavior of the wind about your petticoats.
Thus I did with Susan as with most other things in my earlier days,
dipping her image into my mind and coloring it of a thousand fantastic
hues before I could see her as she really was.
Now, Susan, for a sober picture of our village. It was a small
collection of dwellings that seemed to have been cast up by the sea
with the rock-weed and marine plants that it vomits after a storm, or
to have come ashore among the pipe-staves and other lumber which had
been washed from the deck of an Eastern schooner. There was just space
for the narrow and sandy street between the beach in front and a
precipitous hill that lifted its rocky forehead in the rear among a
waste of juniper-bushes and the wild growth of a broken pasture. The
village was picturesque in the variety of its edifices, though all were
rude. Here stood a little old hovel, built, perhaps, of driftwood,
there a row of boat-houses, and beyond them a two-story dwelling of
dark and weatherbeaten aspect, the whole intermixed with one or two
snug cottages painted white, a sufficiency of pig-styes and a
shoemaker’s shop. Two grocery stores stood opposite each other in the
centre of the village. These were the places of resort at their idle
hours of a hardy throng of fishermen in red baize shirts, oilcloth
trousers and boots of brown leather covering the whole leg—true
seven-league boots, but fitter to wade the ocean than walk the earth.
The wearers seemed amphibious, as if they did but creep out of salt
water to sun themselves; nor would it have been wonderful to see their
lower limbs covered with clusters of little shellfish such as cling to
rocks and old ship-timber over which the tide ebbs and flows. When
their fleet of boats was weather-bound, the butchers raised their
price, and the spit was busier than the frying-pan; for this was a
place of fish, and known as such to all the country round about. The
very air was fishy, being perfumed with dead sculpins, hard-heads and
dogfish strewn plentifully on the beach.—You see, children, the village
is but little changed since your mother and I were young.
How like a dream it was when I bent over a pool of water one pleasant
morning and saw that the ocean had dashed its spray over me and made me
a fisherman! There was the tarpaulin, the baize shirt, the oilcloth
trousers and seven-league boots, and there my own features, but so
reddened with sunburn and sea-breezes that methought I had another
face, and on other shoulders too. The seagulls and the loons and I had
now all one trade: we skimmed the crested waves and sought our prey
beneath them, the man with as keen enjoyment as the birds. Always when
the east grew purple I launched my dory, my little flat-bottomed skiff,
and rowed cross-handed to Point Ledge, the Middle Ledge, or perhaps
beyond Egg Rock; often, too, did I anchor off Dread Ledge—a spot of
peril to ships unpiloted—and sometimes spread an adventurous sail and
tracked across the bay to South Shore, casting my lines in sight of
Scituate. Ere nightfall I hauled my skiff high and dry on the beach,
laden with red rock-cod or the white-bellied ones of deep water,
haddock bearing the black marks of St. Peter’s fingers near the gills,
the long-bearded hake whose liver holds oil enough for a midnight lamp,
and now and then a mighty halibut with a back broad as my boat. In the
autumn I toled and caught those lovely fish the mackerel. When the wind
was high, when the whale-boats anchored off the Point nodded their
slender masts at each other and the dories pitched and tossed in the
surf, when Nahant Beach was thundering three miles off and the spray
broke a hundred feet in the air round the distant base of Egg Rock,
when the brimful and boisterous sea threatened to tumble over the
street of our village,—then I made a holiday on shore.
Many such a day did I sit snugly in Mr. Bartlett’s store, attentive to
the yarns of Uncle Parker—uncle to the whole village by right of
seniority, but of Southern blood, with no kindred in New England. His
figure is before me now enthroned upon a mackerel-barrel—a lean old man
of great height, but bent with years and twisted into an uncouth shape
by seven broken limbs; furrowed, also, and weatherworn, as if every
gale for the better part of a century had caught him somewhere on the
sea. He looked like a harbinger of tempest—a shipmate of the Flying
Dutchman. After innumerable voyages aboard men-of-war and merchantmen,
fishing-schooners and chebacco-boats, the old salt had become master of
a hand-cart, which he daily trundled about the vicinity, and sometimes
blew his fish-horn through the streets of Salem. One of Uncle Parker’s